


Yes

by Mama_Nihil



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Asexual Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Lovers of purple prose gather round, M/M, Other, Sensual Attraction, because it wouldn't be mine if it wasn't filled to the brim with angst, ish, just that on-the-cusp moment that I need to write again and again, mixed metaphors may also occur, now in a new sandbox, yay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-12 18:04:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20568590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mama_Nihil/pseuds/Mama_Nihil
Summary: Even if actions speak louder than words, sometimes words need to be spoken. Aziraphale confronts his three main quibbles under the gentle guidance of a demon that quietly sacrifices all he is, and comes out on the other side slightly bruised but rewarded.A lot of this was inspired by purplefringe vids'Hallelujah video.





	1. The premise

So the question is: if everything changes, do you change with it? If the world is created new by some divine kind of hellish magic, are you transformed too? All those well-worn little insecurities, all those pointless questions that keep you awake when the world’s asleep… even your clothes. If it’s all rebooted, surely your brand new suit won’t smell of yesterday, because yesterday has been erased along with every confession you never made?

Thousands of years and I still believe such tosh. Because I don’t change. Sometimes I think that’s the whole point of my kind. The chill of ever-unsullied beauty. The physical manifestation of dogma. Utter stagnancy until the end of time – which, by the way, came and went in a rather anticlimactic fashion, but who am I to criticise? The world is new, there’s a fresh batch of bright young tomorrows, even I would be new if I could only shed my skin.

Ah… These little slip-ups. They remind me how different we are. How incompatible. In fact, now that I think about it I can see that he actually has shed something – the tinge of scorn that used to protect us from the way he stares at me. But me? I’m the same old prudish dork that gets his bowtie in a twist at the mere thought of “dining at the Ritz”.

Not that I’m going to let that ruin my meal.

When we arrive, everything glitters. It’s as if the whole restaurant is splashed with champagne. But as we approach our table, I catch a smell that’s only too apt: there’s a hint of smoke when I pinch my trousers, hitch them up a little, and sit. It wafts up at me from my jacket, my shirt. An olfactory smudge on what should be the first day of the rest of eternity. For a moment, a prematurely alcohol-addled part of my brain wonders if it’s a trace from the bookshop. _The bookshop_. I ask you. I wasn’t even there when it burned.

_But he was._

A warm frisson travels through me and I flex my fingers. There’s a vague buzz in them, like giddy bumblebees. Precisely the sort of thing that will make the glass tremble when I hold it. My pulse is already strong enough to knock it out of my fingers.

Not that you’d know it from looking at me. I can cram six thousand years’ worth of tempestuous emotion into what luckily passes for a smile in this country. I can take delirium and nervousness and panicked euphoria and translate it all to a mere twinkle of the eye and a slightly over-enthusiastic hand gesture. But _I_ know there’s more beneath the surface, and the knowing coupled with the trying-not-to is what sullies this blessed hour together so that even if this is the only thing I ever wanted, I don’t really feel anything.

As I balance my champagne glass on fingers now gone numb, I expect him to smirk at the way I cover my clumsiness with stiff decorum. But he never does, so why do I keep expecting it? He’s too busy being _him_ to give any thought to the way I’m… well, being me, I suppose.

I take a sip. On cue, he leans forward and rests his chin in his hand. I shift in my seat, bothered. Time for the _grand couvert_. For a moment I wonder that he never attended one of the actual Sun King’s dinners while he had the chance, but even as I think it, I know it’s not the act of eating he finds interesting. Somehow, based on some twisted kind of demon logic, it’s me. I’m what he finds interesting. I wonder if he’d find it interesting to know what that knowledge does to me.

Behind dark glasses, reptilian pupils zone in on whatever it is they zone in on when it absolutely cannot be my lips. “So what was it like being me?”

“Well…” My cheek twitches and I sense amber irises flicking left to note it. “I wasn’t.” _Nudge, nudge, wink, wink_.

But he’ll have none of my deflections. “You know what I mean.”

“Why should I go first?” It comes out tittery and foolish, but in his books that’s just who I am and nothing to take note of. Instead he leans back languidly, somehow managing to occupy three chairs even though he’s only got the one.

“Alright, well… Being you, it felt… _tight_,” he says. “Stifling. Couldn’t move in that ridiculous waistcoat.”

I pull off another wobbly smile. I know he doesn’t mean the waistcoat. He means me. I’ve felt him. I’ve felt what it’s like to be him. Of course he was stifled in me. So much life with so little room to live it in. The give that isn’t there. The way everything is clipped, from my speech to my wings. I could _see_ him struggle to fit his flamboyance to the creaky resistance of my iron rod primness.

And me?

The memory of his body merging with mine tugs at my muscles. I remember how it felt to be that _whole_ – as if everything within me stretched. It wasn’t so much that his limbs were longer, just more alive. Looser, warmer. I could breathe for the first time since…

Well. I’ve never really breathed, have I?

I realise there’s a silence growing between us, and I clear my throat. “Alright. Yes. I suppose being _you_ felt… nice.”

A thrown glove, but his only response is a quirked eyebrow. I choke on a giggle, swallow it down forcibly because God, I’m fed up with my inane giggles. I want to be him again. I want to lean forward, safe in the fluidity of his movements, and put my hand on his. I want to be the cocky one, to tease him with physical affection and watch him flounder – but that’s completely out of bounds. He doesn’t do touch. And neither do I, really. I reserve my sensual pleasures for inanimate objects: leather-bound tomes, whipped cream cheese, the smooth round stones of an English beach. That’s always been my tonic, but lately I’ve come to long for more. Something that zings and tingles with peculiar newness.

So maybe I have changed after all. But it’s not a welcome change.

“Yes, it _is_ nice being me,” he taunts, syllables snake-sliding off his tongue as if he’s trying to lure me in somehow, but it’s not his words or voice or tongue that have me coiled in a spring of frustration. It’s something else, and I can’t find a word for it. I’m drawn to the sound of him, but even as I watch his lips move, I don’t want to kiss them. I want to sample the structure of his hair with my palm and feel how the visuals of auburn waves translate to touch. I want to stroke his cheek with the back of my fingers, feather-light and chaste. I want to hold softly. To gather that dark ball of fluff in my arms and wait until his teethy growl subsides.

But I would never. Because if he doesn’t have his sharp defiance, then what is he? I would taint the last shred of demon in him for no other reason than to satisfy my own hunger. And I can use the shrimp canape for that.

My smile doesn’t waver as I spear a pink squishy crescent with silver tines. Determined to make the most of our hour together, I chatter on like Tweety Bird while his hand of coolness rests on the table between us, untouched.

And something within me wails.

“Will you stop it?”

It’s so quiet, I’m not sure it’s real at first. But when the glass-piercing glare turns on me I know he actually spoke.

I clear my throat again. Seriously, I have the clearest throat in England. “Pardon?”

“Will you –” He bites down on frustration. Then he turns to me fully, chair and all. Something about it makes me sit up straighter than ever, because – and this is something I’ve never consciously formulated to myself – he almost never faces me, not like this, not with his whole being. Most of the time he looks at me from a sarcastic profile, as if he’s too cool to address me directly. And even as I think it, I know I do the same thing, minus the coolness. We always stand _beside_ each other. Even when we’re face to face, it’s always with a part of us turned away. Except for that one time, but now is not the moment to dwell on lost moments.

Nailing me with covered eyes, he spells out the words through makeshift patience. “It will sound like I’m angry with you. I’m not. Well, I am, but only because fucking Gabriel…” He stops, mouth an angry squiggle. “How long. How fucking long have you put up with that nonsense?”

“I, er…”

“I look at you, I mean I’ve always looked at you and wondered what the hell you’re so afraid of, and now…” He glares like only he can glare, like the very air is an affront to his face. “Is this –” He gestures at me from curls to toes, “– what they made you? Or is it you? I mean, I’m confused here. Am I talking to Aziraphale or the remnants of six thousand years of abuse?”

A trap door opens beneath me. I’m suspended above nothingness.

“I’ve spent most of those six thousand years on Earth,” I chirp, because chirping is what I do best and I have no other weapons.

He cocks his head, a sneer his only question mark.

I smile down at my half eaten canape, but the taste of shrimp is no longer pleasant. In fact it’s taken on the faint tinge of vomit. “I let Gabriel prattle on to hurry things along.” I shrug. “He likes to feel in charge. There’s really no harm done.”

“No harm done?”

It’s so sudden, I have no defences. His meaning shoots straight into my heart: I’m a broken angel. What I am is wrong. It shouldn’t be this way. The thousand little comforts I’ve whispered to myself, my small defiances, they’re a lie. I could have been someone else if not for my history, and Crowley… resents it. Resents who I am, what I’ve become.

He would have preferred an unbroken angel.

But then what is _he_ but an angel broken beyond repair? And in my eyes nothing could be more beautiful. The thought squeezes my throat, the utter horror of it: to love something so fallen, so ruined. I should be railing against the forces that made it happen, not admiring the result.

Swallowing drily, I dab my mouth with a napkin. “Well, this was all very lovely, but now I really have to –”

He shoots out a hand, but stops before he touches my arm. Without looking round to see if we’re being watched, he takes off his glasses. Those disconcerting pupils, usually so hard to look into, have widened a little. I teeter on the edge of that unknowable abyss and don't even have the wherewithal to ask for strength from above. That's how far I've strayed. I just find myself wondering if time has played another trick on us, because I seem to be floating on centuries of amber.

Then it all snaps back into regular ticking as he withdraws, along with the hypnotizing effect he has on me. "Really have to what?”

I surface to a conversation I no longer recognize. “Er… what?”

“You were saying… that you have to leave? Got something to do? Something… important?”

Like not falling into the abyss? Yes and no.

“Angel,” he murmurs, and the sound of him slithers down my spine. There’s too much feeling in there, and it’s so jarring. It’s what I’ve been running away from – and towards – forever. “I want you to do something for me.”

“Oh?”

“It’s the only thing I’ll ever ask. And if you want to get technical about it, it’s really you doing something for you.”

His hand is still there, close to my arm, but not touching. I try not to think about it, and it’s all I can think about. “Yes?” It comes out dry, barely audible.

“Come on.” He gets to his feet, and somehow I do too. We’re joined by an invisible rubber band, and whenever he moves, I’m dragged along. Which is worrying on so many levels that my mind just shuts down, preferring not to touch it.

“Another temptation?” I giggle, and his jaw sets.

“Actually… yes.”


	2. The pinnacle

An angel with a fear of heights. If _that_ doesn’t tell you something...

Ever attentive to my silly fears, Crowley stands a little behind me, providing some small shelter as the wind whips at our garments. He’s steady, balanced, calm, and I’m thinking how many angels would fit on the head of a pin if one angel can’t even keep his feet on a massive glass phallus.

“Afraid?”

“No.”

He doesn’t even need to smile. He always knows when I’m lying. I look down the faceted side of the Shard, thinking it looks vaguely like scales glittering in the afternoon sun, and the thought does nothing for my vertigo. Still, if I can eat with him looking, surely I can spend a few minutes atop the tallest building in London.

“So what are we doing here?”

Crowley makes a sweeping yet noncommittal gesture. “View.”

Even in the midst of fearing for my corporeal life, I chuckle. He would make the worst tour guide, and yet I would book every excursion.

He takes my laughter the wrong way. “You don’t like it?”

I smile at the way he pouts, and then fling my hands out to regain my balance as another gust buffets at me. There’s the hint of body heat as he moves slightly closer, and there’s another kind of heat where I let the thought of it sink in. Attempting to distract myself, I take an actual look at the view, and of course it’s stunning. The city may not be the work of God per se, but her heavenly light shines down on it, honey yellow seeping into pink as the sun is pulled lower.

Oh crap. We’re actually watching a sunset, aren’t we?

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

He nods, a mixture of satisfaction and frustration on his face. Perhaps he’ll never fully come to terms with his feelings for this world. Again that protective instinct rises in me, the urge to touch.

“You know it’s fine to… love the creation and hate the Creator?” It takes all I am to be able to say it, and judging by the look he gives me, he knows.

“Yes…” He sighs. “But I don’t _hate_ her. I think she made some questionable decisions, but who doesn’t?” His face hardens. “You know what it was _actually_ like being you?”

I tense. “No?”

“It was a knife in the heart.”

I can’t help glancing his way, but I say nothing. My consciousness is all caught up in one word, like a mermaid in a fisherman’s net: _heart?_

“I wanted to kill him,” Crowley snarls. “But being you… I couldn’t. I just wore your shell, I mean, I was still me, you know? And yet…” He pauses, and a muscle in his jaw flexes. “I _couldn’t_. That’s what I really meant when I said it felt ‘tight’. There was no room to move because God didn’t make you that way. She made sure you couldn’t rebel by shackling you in that perfect form of yours.”

My lips quiver around a number of inappropriate responses, and I settle for diplomatic silence.

“I suppose she learned her lesson after creating the likes of me. Can’t have too much free will floating about, or beings might start making their own decisions, and then where would we be?”

There’s such bitterness in his voice, I don’t know what to say, what face to wear.

“And fine, you know, that’s one way of rolling. Freedom with responsibility isn’t the only way. You can have enlightened despots and all sorts. But _imprisonment_ with responsibility, what kind of crooked deal is that? No freedom at all, and yet all the obligations. So I wonder, what’s the perk? There must be something, right? Like… I don’t know. Being treasured. Yes? She wouldn’t want to lose you.”

“Well…”

“Look down.”

It’s the last thing I want to do, but I still obey. And down there, far, far down there’s a flicker of flame. I frown. A gateway to Hell in the middle of London?

“Yes, well, you have to have a door somewhere,” Crowley answers my unvoiced question. “It’s not important. The thing is, if she appreciates you – if you’re not just an expendable worker bee – she would save you. Yes?”

“Of course…” I mumble, not really listening, because it really is a long way down from the pinnacle to the pit.

“So jump into the fire.”

I stop in the middle of a slight case of hyperventilation. “Uh… what?”

“Jump.” He doesn’t meet my gaze, just tosses the word out there like a used-up cigarette butt.

“But…”

“_Someone_ will catch you.”

Before I can stop myself, I say, “You will.”

Even with only his profile for a clue, I know I’ve said the right thing. 

“Touché.” It’s a mere whisper. It should be ripped away by the wind, but instead it coils into my ear like a baby serpent. _Touché_, like the answer to a prayer I’ve directed at the wrong person. He looks down at his feet, or mine, or the walls of the Shard, or the fire below, I don’t know. And then he says, “Jump, Aziraphale.”

My heart sinks. Crowley is quite the pedagogue when he wants to be, and this particular lesson will be etched into my soul forever. “You already know I won’t.”

“Because…?”

“Because I don’t want to know.”

We stand for a while in silence, and the wind seems to have lessened a little, or maybe my fear of it has abated, in any case I’m surer on my feet now and my heart isn’t beating as hard as it was.

After a while it comes, low but perfectly audible: “Don’t report.” A pause – for dramatic effect, I know, but it still works. “Ever again.”

I sigh. “You know I ha–”

“You have to? Not really. Will they miss you?”

An ache squeezes my throat. “You still think we can run away,” I mumble – meaning to end with a question mark, but somehow my voice has other plans.

He shrugs. “Call it what you will. I don’t think there needs to be a lot of actual running involved. In fact I suspect they’re only too glad to let both of us just… fade away.”

My lips begin to form the age-old words _I can’t_, but again my voice seems to have severed the ties to whatever still poses as me. I want to say that I can’t just let myself drift, with no purpose and no authority to succumb to. I don’t know how to function if I’m not in the service of a higher something. And the loss howls through me worse than the wind.

As if he has a direct line to my innermost turmoil, Crowley says, “You know how humans nowadays say Hell is an eternity without God?”

“_Yes_,” I whisper.

He wraps his arms around himself and gazes off into the distance. “I kind of get what they mean.”

Swallowing down the physical manifestation of my grief, I murmur, “I thought you liked Hell.”

He shrugs moodily.

“I mean, at least a little bit. Better than Heaven, right?”

“Do _you_ like Heaven?”

I try not to let anything show on my face, but it’s a losing battle. For all my sorrow, there’s nothing for me there. And that’s what I’m really grieving. “I like Earth better.”

Crowley nods. “Well, there you go.”

I’m not sure what he means, but there I go indeed. I won’t return, I know that now. The ache flares and then dulls like the phantom pain it is. The longing for something that never was.

“Alright.” He turns his back to the sinking sun. “Let’s go.”


	3. The alternative

Humid evening air swirls around us as we step onto the street again. I breathe out, relieved to be back on solid ground.

“So do you ever long for revenge?”

“_Revenge_?” It comes out comically aghast, and Crowley chuckles.

“Yes, Angel. To get back at those stuck-up, bewinged idiots who look down their noses at you. No? Never?”

My throat is sticky-dry and tight. “Look. The thing is… well, you see, there’s… well, a _part_ of me, but…” I stall with one of my little titters-slash-whimpers that I always wish would somehow speak for me, but they never do. For all the frustration I pour into them, no one ever reads them correctly, no one ever –

“You feel like an anomaly.”

“Uh…”

He turns on his heel in that suave way of his, and I resist an instinct to take a step back – or forward, I’m not sure which.

“An anomaly. Uncategorizable. Like you’re neither here nor there. But if you ask for it, you can be whole. Be a fallen angel instead of a broken one. Be fully bad. Have the world. Just bow before Satan.”

My mouth has momentarily lost all motor functions.

“Don’t look so horrified. Can you honestly tell me you’ve never considered it? Not once?”

I scrabble for purchase in my own mind.

“Because I can tell you, after I finally left that place,” he jerks his head heavenward, “I was welcomed with open arms. I’ve never felt more at home in my life. Well, up to that point. And you can too.”

“Now if that isn’t a load of poppycock,” I mutter, resorting to Briticisms where real language escapes me.

Crowley gives a sad smile. “What, you thought there were no perks in the opposite camp? That we did evil for the sake of doing evil and we never got anything for it? Angel, your God talks of love, but Satan can show love too.”

I hunch my shoulders against the twilight chill. The deepening shadows are calm and disinterested, no eyes are upon us. We’re huddled in an indigo cocoon of privacy, and he’s telling me I can change masters. That life as I know it doesn’t have to be over just because I’ve abandoned God. He’s telling me there’s another fold, another yoke, another mission to fulfil. It feels like a taunt, and yet I know he’s entirely serious. If he could fall, then so can I. For all the built-in firewalls protecting me against free will, I still have it in me. There are chinks in the armour, and Satan is nothing if not an excellent finder of armour-chinks.

But in the end this particular temptation is pointless. I’m too nice. Yes, there’s a part of me that perks up in childish excitement at the thought of tossing my beige garb and pledging myself to Hell, but if I’m quite honest about the whole thing I would make an even worse demon than I ever was angel.

I let the brief impulse slip away with a sigh. “Thank you for the information, Crowley, but you know as well as I do that I’ll never be anything other than this dithery, quaint little being who always wants to do good and never quite measures up.”

There’s a prolonged silence. Is he surprised after all? Did he think I was that gullible? Can he actually picture me as a servant of evil, swashbuckling it through the world like a mourner-garbed diva?

I chance a look, and the expression on his face defies description. “You know…” He frowns. “I never understood the phrase ‘broke the mould’.”

“I’m… sorry?”

His irises glow a muted gold in the gathering darkness. “The humans. They have this saying: ‘when they made you, they broke the mould’. And I never got it. I never saw anything that… unique.”

_Unique_. I hesitate, breath feather-light on my lips. I’m not sure it’s a compliment, so I don’t know whether to deflect in embarrassment or swallow the barb.

He shakes his head in irritation. “I mean I _did_, but I never connected the dots. She really did break the mould after she made you, didn’t she?”

This is starting to sound dangerously smooth-talky. “Well, who wouldn’t?” I titter, determined to keep all flattery at arm’s length.

Crowley purses his lips. “_I_ wouldn’t. I would make a few extra copies if one decided to hurl himself from the Shard. Or fall at Satan’s feet.”

Despite myself, I smile. “But I’ve done neither of those things.”

“True.”

“So I’ve passed some sort of test?”

The look he gives me is so soft I want to crush my own heart. “Almost.”


	4. The answer

The air is brightening again. We’ve been walking through the night, leaving the heart of London for the bland suburban fields that somehow feel like the end of the Earth, and the black has given way to purple and dark turquoise until finally we’re in that deep breath before the sun blazes like an open wound across the horizon. And that’s where he finally stops.

“Where are we now?”

“Nowhere.” He shrugs. “Wilderness. As much as you can get wilderness in this nation of gardeners.”

_Oh_… “So this is where you tempt me to turn stones into bread.”

A few seconds pass before he replies. “Something like that.”

I’m almost too afraid to continue the conversation, and yet what is there to fear? What can possibly be scary at this point?

“So I suppose it’s time for my final test.”

His mouth becomes a taut line. “One I hope you’ll fail.”

“After rejecting both Heaven and Hell, how could I possibly fall for someth–”

The way he turns to look at me stops me in my tracks: it’s that kind of pointed swivel only he can pull off, a slow motion pirouette of sarcasm, saying, _Do you even believe your own yarns?_ I swallow down the rest of my protestations along with my beating heart. Because I know what my final test is. It’s this. It’s us.

And yet – am I really the one taking it?

“You think you’re not good enough,” he says, and it sounds like it hurts to force the words out. “But you’re good enough for me. When I see you, I…” He stops, and his face betrays something that on any other face would be described as terror. But this is Crowley, and he doesn’t do terror, only mild annoyance. Whatever just reared its head is quickly fought down, and the resulting quirk of his mouth is a cynical reservation against what he’s about to say. “I go _soft_.”

I hardly dare breathe. What did he just say? What have I done? “Um… _soft_?”

Crowley kicks at the ground, because who else can he punish for what’s happening? “It’s… ugh, look, I don’t know how to make poetry and metaphors and all that human stuff, but it’s like… I’m a live wire, you know, all the time, and I don’t even notice it. Like there’s this current running through me, making me do things, keeping me alert and buzzing and sort of… angry.”

“Angry.” I nod encouragement, because that, at least, is a feeling he’s comfortable with.

“But when I see you, it all stops. It slows down. I can relax. Like a kind of… balm. On my soul.” His shoulders rise like wings trying to shield him from his own words. “Ugh, this all sounds idiotic.”

I breathe in for the most courageous words I’ve ever uttered. “I know what you mean. I feel it too.”

He doesn’t look at me. His lips just press together until I’m afraid he’ll burst a capillary.

“Not all the time,” I retract, and his tiny wince yanks at my heart. “Sometimes you just make me more nervous,” I hasten to explain. “But…” 

I stop, choking on a confession that isn’t just overdue, it’s amassed millions of pounds in penalty interest. And I still can’t say it, not with the sight of him, with the awareness of that long, lithe thunder cloud hanging on my words.

Turning away from him and concentrating on the brightening horizon instead, I say, “So many times I’ve been in a scrape, or just in a terrible mood, or a, well, heh, a pit of despair.” I break off to chuckle away the horrifying truth of it. “And… there you’ve been. Like a genie from a bottle. Soothing me. Saving me. Just being like a…” I close my eyes and shake my head. “I _want_ to say ‘white light’, but… you know.”

“A dark light?”

I breathe out a half-laugh. “A dark light.”

“Because you love me.” He says it as if it doesn’t matter.

“Yes!” I burst out, relieved to finally be rid of the divine censorship I’ve always sagged under. But Crowley doesn’t seem to appreciate the momentousness of the occasion, so I add a pointed, “Yes, I do.”

He frowns down at his shoes. “Well, thank you, I suppose.”

“_Thank_ you?”

“You love everything. It’s not exactly an exclusive deal.”

I can’t stop a laugh. So he still doesn’t understand. He knows the facts, he hears the words, he can parrot them back at me, but he doesn’t realise the full extent of what they mean. Because in his mind, his sacrifice must be greater. Being a creature of evil and still turning ‘soft’ for an _angel_ of all things – yes, in his view that trumps anything I can offer.

So I say the only thing I can, the only truth I know. “You think I would have abandoned Heaven for anyone else?”

He goes rigid. For a moment I think I’ve said too much, or the wrong thing. But then it happens: his guard lowers. I can see it happen in the way his lines all smooth out and drop whatever weight he’s carried around all this time. He cocks his head, but not in his usual _are-you-fucking-serious_ way. This time it’s a surrender. The leader finally giving up the reins, the regent stepping down from his crumbling throne.

And if I needed more proof, he reaches out and - Lord help me - _takes my hand_. Slowly, as if to let me savour the moment, his fingers wrap around it. I feel every whorl snag and smooth as his velveteen skin glides over mine, fingertips sliding across my palm and snuggling into my mount of Venus as his thumb settles on my wrist. I feel enclosed, encompassed, sheltered. He curls into me like a watchdog. We’ve held hands before, but never like this. This is a sealing, a gentle miracle. The culmination of everything. As if the whole world has been distilled into the place we touch.

“You’re starving,” he whispers.

“N-no… I’m still full from our din–”

“You’ve starved for centuries, and I never knew.”

So he sees. He knows. I can’t close this book. The curtain has been drawn, and the full extent of my angelic deficiency is laid bare. But it doesn't matter, because now he laces our fingers together. I almost close my eyes at the feel of him, at the sheer joyous bliss of the soft sliding that reminds me how very non-ethereal I am, how much flesh and blood. His knuckles glide down past mine and close the gap between us, our joined fingers miming a prayer he would never speak.

My lips part. I realise it looks like an invitation – and in a way it _is_, because I may want more than this, more than words. I may want to get close enough to breathe the same air, close enough to fire up all the hairs on my skin with that dark, balmy light… But for the rest, we never talked about it. We’ve threaded the dance of love for millennia, we’ve flirted and sacrificed, but we’ve never outlined the contours of what we are to each other. And now we have to. Now I need to force out the naked truth of all the things I want and all the things I don’t want. It’s just that what I want stumbles so close to what I don’t want that I barely understand it myself.

Crowley leans in, and I gasp. Too late –

But he doesn’t kiss me. He only pulls me closer and rests his forehead on mine. A stray lock of hair tickles my temple, and it ignites a happiness so great it could be mistaken for anguish. And all the while his hand, while hot, doesn’t wander. It stays where it is, holding me, stroking me, concentrating all his protection of me in a few tender swipes across my skin. There’s no mouth inching closer, no breath speeding up. Just his other hand slowly encircling my neck until I’m resting with my nose by his ear and my cheek against his.

“I can do touch,” he says, and I can’t help a small laugh.

“No shit.”

I sense his amusement, but I really can’t be bothered about language right now. Because I'm in his embrace, and despite my fearful qualms it’s just arms that want to hold me. It’s not an invitation to more: it _is_ the more. It’s the full stop after a sentence that began with _Once upon a time_ and ended with _ever after_.

And I can finally say the word.


End file.
